Vivian Martin on AllMovie

All but forgotten today, blonde Vivian Martin became, in the mid-1910s, one of Mary Pickford's more successful rivals. A popular stage ingenue who had appeared opposite the legendary Richard Mansfield in Cyrano de Bergerac, Officer 666 and The Only Son, Martin entered films in 1914 courtesy of the then enterprising World Film Corp.. In films such as Little Mademoiselle and The Arrival of Perpetua (both 1915), she was quite clearly being groomed as a competitor to Pickford. And like another of "Our Mary's" rivals, Marguerite Clark, Martin was soon contracted by Paramount, Pickford's employer, who obviously wanted to demonstrate that Mary was not indispensable. Martin, however, even more so than Clark, found herself trapped in vehicles unworthy of her talents and her reign as a box-office champion proved brief. In the early '20s, she briefly operated her own production company, distributing through Goldwyn, but made unwanted headlines when sued for payment of studio rental. The case was settled out of court but Martin's career was over by 1924. She returned as an extra in the sound era and may be glimpsed as an usherette in Folies Bergére (1935).